


A Practical Arrangement

by eudaimon



Category: Silk (TV)
Genre: F/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2013-12-23
Updated: 2013-12-23
Packaged: 2018-01-05 15:41:31
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,112
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/1095732
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/eudaimon/pseuds/eudaimon
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Clive can be incredibly ill-mannered; Martha's never been adverse to taking him in hand.</p>
            </blockquote>





	A Practical Arrangement

**Author's Note:**

  * For [Kainosite](https://archiveofourown.org/users/Kainosite/gifts).



> I was _thrilled_ by your request for D/s fic about these too. Especially the part about spanking. I...have no excuses for this. I have no explanation. I _really_ enjoyed writing it for you and I hope you enjoy reading it.
> 
> HAPPY YULETIDE! ♥

It's only supposed to be a joke, when it starts. When it comes down to it, he's probably her closest friend in London (God help her) and those moments do come, the moments when it's just him and her in one flat or another, a bottle of whisky between them. She toes off her shoes and slips her feet into his lap and he leans forward to top up both of their glasses.

"I'm really am sorry, Martha," he says.

He means the baby. It's not the first time he's said it. She likes it when he's sweet, finds it equal measures surprising and touching, but she also finds it difficult to process. Clive's easier to understand when he's being a bastard, brash and loud and careless. She makes a dismissive gesture; the sympathy is welcome, but it's also sharp-edged, like tiny needles, and her heart feels like it's taken all that it can possibly be expected to take. She needs some distance, now. She needs some space.

She needs Clive to be a little bit of an arsehole.

"If you," she says, holding out her glass for a top up, "are every that much of a prat to a pupil again, I will put you over my knee and bloody _spank_ you."

What Martha isn't expecting is the sudden heat in Clive's face, the way he blushes as he looks away.

"Would you?" A smile tugs at the corner of his mouth. "What else would you do, then?"

Which is what's landed them here.

They always go to Clive's when they're going to do this - regular, pyjamas pushed out of the way in front of the telly sex always seems to happen at Martha's, but this needs a line drawn around it. This is different. Martha arrives at Clive's front door with her mac cinched tight around her waist and one of her bigger handbags over her arm. Clive opens the door in tracksuit bottoms and a t-shirt. Martha arches an eyebrow.

"Well, those are coming off," she says.  
"Yes, Miss," he says. That, combined with the grin, make him look like a naughty teenager. Which should in no way be as attractive as it is. 

It's a good look on him.

Underneath her mac, Martha's wearing stockings and frilly knickers, a corset - every satin inch designed to drive Clive mad. She likes the way he looks at her when she shrugs the coat off her shoulders. She sets her bag down on the foot of his bed and sets her hands on her hips.

"I'm waiting, Clive," she says.

He strips. At thirty-eight (a year older than Martha, and she never lets him forget it), Clive still clearly works hard on himself. He's in good shape and she lets him stand there for a moment, stripped naked and waiting. It'll make him breathe a little faster, make his heart beat a little quicker. Martha bites her lip as she studies him - his chest, the flat muscles of his belly, his thighs. He has a particularly fantastic arse. It might be his most redeeming feature.

"What are you in the mood for?" she asks him, walking in a slow circle to end up behind him.

He shrugs.

"Surprise me," he says.

The contents of her handbag is mostly familiar - all of it bought online and delivered in discreet boxes - but a few things are a surprise. Through experience and experimentation, they've figured out the things that do it for both of them. Clive likes a little bit of pain; nothing extreme, but something that can make it hard for him to focus. He likes it when he's a little bit humiliated. He likes it when Martha makes him feel small.

Because he knows that, really, she loves him. So it's all a game and one that he enjoys losing.  
Martha likes playing it too.

She leans in, pressing a kiss against his chest, wrapping her fingers around his cock and stroking slowly as she teases his nipple with the tip of her tongue.

"Keep your hands to yourself," she warns. "In fact, put them behind your head."

He immediately complies and Martha feels an electric throb of arousal right between her thighs. It's always gratifying to have Clive be so compliant, hanging on her every word. She loves having him in the palm of her hand, metaphorically as well as literally. 

Nudging his feet wider apart with the toe of her shoe, she sucked on one nipple and then the other, worrying tender skin with the edges of her teeth to feel his breath catch, feel him shift and squirm. Clive never talks much when they're doing this; Martha doesn't get off on hearing him call her 'Miss' (and she definitely wasn't to be called _Mistress_ anything). She gives orders and expects them to be followed. He's got a safe-word.

Which is all either of them need.

She attaches clamps to spit-damp nipples and doesn't miss the way his cock twitches, the way he has to struggle to keep his hips still. She wraps her fingers around him, strokes lightly, making sure that she doesn't grip him tight enough to do any good.

"That's lovely and hard, Clive," she murmurs, leaning up to take a kiss, smiling when her chest brushes against the clamps. "Shame you're not going to use it for anything yet. Down on your knees for me. There's a good lad."

Once he's on his knees, she takes a lipstick out of her bag. She writes her name across his chest in bold scarlet letters. She isn't into that misogynistic porn film cliché, sexualised insults scrawled on him. Marking him as hers, signing him like that, makes her hot, makes her wet and she's seen the effect it has on him.

With her hand on the back of his neck, she makes him get down on all fours. He's pliable, letting her move him where she wants him. She spreads his thighs wider apart, pushes her fingers into his fair hair to pull his head higher, making him keep it up. There's a full length mirror fixed to the wall and she makes sure that he's looking himself straight in the eye before she slips the ball-gag between parted lips, fastens it firmly behind his head.

"Alright?" she asks him, smoothing his hair with the palm of her hand.  
He nods.

Kneeling behind him, she squeezes lube liberally into the cleft of his arse, starts to fuck him with one finger. She knows for a fact that she wasn't the first woman to use her fingers on him like this, to fuck his arse with her fingers like this, but she does like to think that nobody's pushed him as hard as she does. She gets three slick fingers into him, makes a point of being a little bit rough, emphasising the fact that this part is a means to an end, not focusing on providing any pleasure whatsoever. It's part of the game that he has to _earn_ that - she makes him work for it. She twists her fingers and he grunts softly into the gag.

"Ready for more?" she asks.  
Another nod.

The plug is snub and black and it looks obscene once she's pressed it into him, the circular base nestled between the cheeks of his arse. Martha taps it with the palm of her hand. This time, the grunt's louder, on the verge of being a moan.

"You've been a vile boy, Clive. You know what you get."

She starts with the palm of her right hand, delivering smart smacks to both cheeks of his arse, the tops of his thighs. She reaches under him to slap his belly, twist the clamps. Clive's got fair skin and it starts to flush quickly. She slaps him hard enough to leave a perfect print of her hand on one cheek of his arse. When he squirms away from her, she puts her hand in the small of his back and clicks her tongue against her teeth.

"If you don't stay still, Clive, the next one's going to be to your cock."

She watches him still. Watches him quiet. When she lands another slap against his arse, he shivers but he doesn't move an inch.

"Good boy," she murmurs and, in the mirror, she sees the flicker of a smile around the gag.

Once his arse is good and red, she pinches at sore skin and then gets up, standing where he can see her before stripping down to nothing but her stockings. Clive's bed is wide and almost impossibly soft, loaded with white pillows and Martha arranges herself on it, spreading her thighs side.

"Come on then," she says. "Come here."

It's testament to how far Clive's come since they started doing this that he doesn't even try to get up off his hands and knees. He keeps his head down and he crawls to the bed before climbing up with her. He doesn't need to be told to position himself between her thighs. She leans forward, loosening the gag, dropping it on the bed next to her.

"Go on then," she says. He bends his head and presses an open mouthed kiss between her legs, right against her cunt. He traces his tongue over her and sucks lightly on her clit. She arches her back and presses herself as close to his mouth as she can get. He's fucking fantastic at this - years of practice - and Martha just lies back and lets him . She doesn't complain when his hands slide under her arse to lift her. She lets him all but bury his face in her, her breath sobbing in and out, her back arching as she rocks her hips rhythmically in the cradle of his palms. She palms one of her breasts, rubbing her thumb across her nipple. The other hand presses into his hair, fingers twisting to pull slightly. He shifts one of his hands between her thighs, pressing two fingers into her, fucking her as his mouth slid over her.

She comes, trembling, sobbing his name, held firmly in place by his hands.

When he lifts his head, she tugs him up over her, plucking the clamps off him, smudging the lipstick on his chest a little as she pulls him down for an open mouth kiss, tasting her cunt on his lips and tongue.

"You're amazing, Martha," he murmurs.  
"I'm not finished with you yet," she says. She kisses him again and then leans past him, reaching for her lipstick. Carefully, she writes her name on his forehead.

"Now turn around," she says. "I want you to watch yourself the whole time."  
"Oh, Jesus, Martha," he says, but he does it, turns around and faces himself in the mirror, doesn't turn his head while Martha moves around in his peripheral vision, slipping the straps around her hips, slipping half of the toy inside her and settling it. She's still sensitive enough that it makes her breath catch when she gets back onto the bed and it shifts.

"Ready?"

He nods.

"Fuck yes."

She tortures him a little bit at first, dragging the plug out of him slowly, rubbing the head of her cock along the crack of his arse. Once she's inside him, she fucks him slowly, deeply, with long deliberately strokes. One hand stayed on Clive's hip, the other between her own thighs, rubbing her clit as she thrust into him. Clive swayed forward, catching his weight on one bent arm so he could slip the other underneath him, fingers wrapped around his cock, stroking quickly. In the reflection in the mirror, Martha caught his eye, blue in a flushed face, her name scrawled across his skin.

"Oh, Jesus, Martha, please. _Please_."  
"Go on, then. Do it."

They come like that, both of them, within seconds of each other, looking each other straight in the eye.

Afterwards, they collapse into a sweaty knot and Martha fishes make-up wipes out of her bag to clean up the lipstick. They kiss with less urgency. She smoothes Clive's fair hair into place. Sometimes, she wonders how life might have been different if she'd had that baby. How they might have made a life.

They've got this instead.

It's not love. It's not even dancing.  
It's arrangement and it works for both of them.

Right then, right in that moment, she wouldn't change a thing. She can't quite get all of the lipstick off. In the morning, Clive'll shower but, for now, he falls into a doze with the shadow of Martha's name still written over his heart.

There's probably a metaphor in that.


End file.
